‘Is This Really Happening?’

Madeleine Kearns is a young journalist from Scotland. She works at National Review. She has recently been on an unusual beat: transgenderism as it relates to children. She has written, “… some American children are on irreversible cross-sex hormones as young as 12 and have double mastectomies as young as 13.” When you hear about these cases, she says, you want to ask, “Is this really happening?” It is. Jay Nordlinger talks with her about it: a fascinating, appalling subject. Maddy Kearns would rather not be covering it. But someone has to do it, she says, and what happened is this: “I learned too much to be able to walk away in good conscience.”

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There are 9 comments.

This is absolutely horrifying. I really believe that some of these children will grow up with their horribly mutilated bodies and sue their parents and doctors. And they would have a case! It is almost like the thalidomide horrors. “First do no harm” should be heeded again.

I also wonder if perhaps rather than being more cautious in Britain they simply don’t want to spend the money. It seems you have to wait for many medical procedures under the NHS.

This was so disturbing, I had to turn it off. It strikes me that while there are occasional true cases of sexual disphoria, the majority are jumping on a bandwagon.

Perhaps a couple of rules. No child’s body should be mutilated with body parts being cut off while they are a child, even if the parents and child really, really want to do so. After the child is adult, the choice is up to him or her.

Schools are entitled to have the trans child shower separately from other children.

People who have issues with transgenderism are not bigots.

Transgirls who were born male should not be allowed to participate in female only competitive sports due to the inherent unfair advantage.

I’d like to make four points, split into two comments because of the word count (why??):

History is rife with unique and transient psychological epidemics. The “wanderlust” epidemic, mass faintings, St. Vitus’s Dance, Jerusalem syndrome, “penis shrinking” syndrome in the Far East, etc. There are psychological disorders that are entirely unique to certain cultures, places, or times. There are those common in the modern West that are entirely nonexistent elsewhere.

What’s probably really happening is there is an underlying disorder of/in the mind that gets expressed in different ways depending on the surrounding culture. So people who have gender dysphoria in modern America and Europe simply would not have it if they had been born in a different time or place; they’d have some other disorder that might be barely recognizable as an expression of the same condition. It’s only because people are being, as the podcast said, marinated in this idea from an early age that this is how it comes out. By making transgenderism a major cultural and political cause, they’re digging a psychological “canal”, encouraging this mental disorder to flow in a particular direction.

Of course, leftists will claim without evidence that what’s actually happening in all those other cultures that don’t have transgenderism is “suppression”.

2. What really fascinates me about LGBT theory is its valve-like nature. The podcast touched on it briefly when Madeleine mentioned “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”, but I’d like to explore it a little deeper. Leftists claim that people can become gay or transgender late in life. Yet this is an entirely one-way street. Nobody’s allowed to “start off” gay or transgender and then become cis. Heck, apparently, even if you became gay or transgender in college, you can never go back! They are so certain of this – do they have any science backing this up?

3. Jay asked if there’s some sort of “emergency” that kids need to have hormone replacement therapy Right Now rather than waiting until they’re 18, and Madeleine said that activists claim the kids will commit suicide. That’s actually not the only reason. If you start hormonal replacement therapy earlier in life, the transformation of the body is more thorough, because you don’t have to undo one kind of puberty in order to replace it with another; you prevent the “wrong” puberty from happening altogether. And I’m less certain of this, but I seem to recall reading that the incidence of cancer – which can be a side effect of hormone replacement therapy – is lower the earlier it starts.

This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder how the hell, we as conservatives can possibly be losing the culture war – constantly. Who can really be behind this, aside from some crazy people. It seems like you could be a ‘social democrat’, progressive, socialist, full blown communist or a disciple of Stalin, Lennon, Trotsky, or Mao and still find this abhorrent. The case of some sicko boy getting girls to think to think they are boys is horrific. I honestly couldn’t blame anyone if anything happened to that kid.

I know we conservatives are evil racists because we think some kind of border control is a good idea and we want a smaller government and lower taxes. But seriously, I really don’t see why the various minority populations in this country would support this movement. Support of transgenderism and infanticide don’t seem like minor positions of fringes of the Democrat party. They seem like full blown policy mandates.

I suspect a large part of this is many on the left’s hatred of America – despite their protestations that they, too, are proud flag waving nephews of their Uncle Sam. I can’t believe them, though. To me, they seem hell bent on tearing this country down, by any and all means necessary.

Makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out – or maybe one of these ‘parents’ or ‘advocates’. Thank you Ms. Kearns for investigating this and may God keep you from harm. As always Jay thanks for the interview and shining a light on this subject.